Poetry – Page 2 – Skelton Sketches

Carefree Bees…

Posted on August 20, 2014April 29, 2017 by lindaskelton

My overgrown oregano patch has been just alive with bees this summer!

Their drone is the sound of summer.

“Busy as a bee” seems an apt idiom in view of their incessant buzzing about, so I had to chuckle at a poem that I discovered one morning this week.

Ignoring breakfast dishes I had plunked down on the couch to check out my new library acquisition—a collection of Ogden Nash poems titled I Wouldn’t Have Missed It. Actually, before I even decided to sit down with this book, I had burst out laughing in the middle of the kitchen just sampling Ogden’s word play. Oh my. I rarely get my elusive funny bone tickled like that. Laughter, the perfect gift for a serious soul; I felt like God had hand-picked the book for me! So I postponed dishes and read poems for the next happy while!

In this particular poem Nash wryly suggests that only man was created to live by the sweat of his brow.

“So far as I know, mankind is the only section of creation
That is doomed to either pers- or ex-piration.”

He goes on to playfully debunk bees’ apparent industriousness–

“And bees don’t do anything either, bees just have a reputation for industry because they are sharp enough to buzz,

And people hear a bee buzzing and don’t realize that buzzing isn’t any trouble for a bee so they think that it is doing more than it actually does.”

–and then he proposes the comical idea of a bee laughing. I love it!

“So next time you are about to expend some enthusiasm on the bee’s wonderful industrial powers.

Just remember that that wonderful bee would die laughing if you asked it to change places with you and get its brow moist while you went around spending the day smelling flowers.”

Ha! Now I must go smell some flowers and watch some laughing bees! ( :

Take time to smile today–and find something that makes you laugh. With God in control of the world, and watching out for our well-being we can afford the luxury!

–LS

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? Rom.8:31-32

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The poem cited is: “Grasshoppers are very Intelligent” p.51 of I Wouldn’t Have Missed It—selected poems by Ogden Nash, 1972 (Thank God for libraries that don’t toss all their old books!!)

To read the poem in its entirety go here.
Or to find a chuckle of your own, check out this website: http://www.poemhunter.com/ogden-nash/poems/

Daffodils

Posted on April 10, 2014April 29, 2017 by lindaskelton

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

But wait—these daffodils were in a parking lot, and I wasn’t wandering, I was trotting about my Tuesday business in town.

So they were all the more delightful for the pause they afforded me in the middle of activity…

I stopped to capture them in digital media for safe-keeping, an option Wordsworth evidently did not have…

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed–and gazed–but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

–William Wordsworth

But I am taken with his poem and with daffodils–how could I not be?!

–LS

Wishing you many bright and hopeful signs of new life within and without.

“…for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure”. Phil.2:13

The trudge

Posted on March 13, 2014April 28, 2017 by lindaskelton

I was tired of walking—really, trudging is what it had become.

I guess I was just tired…Sunday afternoons are made for resting aren’t they? The sun had lured me out the door but my energy was flagging…a cold coming on perhaps?

So I turned off the beaten track and settled myself on a little rise amongst the barren poplars…overlooking the sea just beyond–

And I pulled out my new book of Robert Frost’s poems (on my Kindle, of course)…and I just sat there warmed by sunshine, lulled by a trickle of water close by, and browsed among neatly laid lines of words for awhile, and read—of roses, and hayfields, of woods, and of butterflies, sorrow and love. I’ve always like Frost’s way of putting things.

And I sat silent for awhile, wordless and content to have found a spot to soak in sun.

Eventually, treading my way home, I turned aside at the little abandoned quarry—a pocket of water and silence. Louie used to stop here for a drink on our walks. It’s been a long while.

I was wishing I were home already. Tired of walking. Tired of old tired roads.

A little further along I saw a track uphill I had never noticed before. Who can resist a new trail to an unknown destination?

Curiosity overcame tired legs and up we went…

It was just a short climb to a tabletop of stone with a panoramic view. So that’s how you get here! I’d always seen this lone fir on its rocky promontory from the highway and wondered…

Now I know!

Sweet surprise for an afternoon’s trudge.

–LS

Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun.” Eccl 11:7 KJV

P.S. If you enjoy Robert Frost’s poetry, don’t miss his first anthology, A Boy’s Will, available free online at BooksShouldBeFree.com

I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.